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HOLD ON!

Drag legend Hedda Lettuce hosts a tribute screening to the granddaddy of all disaster movies The Poseidon Adventure (1972) this upcoming Saturday night, 10 P.M. at Clearview Chelsea Theatres on 23rd Street and 8th Avenue. Forget the atrocious remakes, this is the one to see!

As everyone knows by now it is New Year’s Eve on the SS Poseidon when just after the stroke of midnight a huge tidal wave cause the ship to go topsy turvy and a small band of survivors must climb, crawl, swim their way to the bottom now the top of the ship. Hip preacher Gene Hackman leads to safety a ragtag band of stereotypes including tough talking cop Ernest Borgnine and his foul-mouthed ex-prostitute panties-wearing only wife Stella Stevens; an old Jewish couple Shelley Winters and Jack Albertson; helpless hippie singer Carol Lynley; lonely bachelor Red Buttons; injured steward Roddy McDowall; and two kids Pamela Sue Martin and Eric Shea. The fun of course is that most don’t make it.

I saw this movie at the Westbury Drive-in on Long Island for my 12th birthday on May 11, 1973. The movie was such a hit that it was still playing theatres 5 months after it opened in December 1972. I was totally mesmerized by this movie. What stayed with me for days that turned to weeks that turned to years was the scene of the ship turning upside down and the lovely Carol Lynley bedecked in hot pants and go-go boots as Nonnie. For some reason I identified with her most because of all the survivors she couldn’t swim (I am a weak swimmer myself) and showed the most fear as I imagined I would in such a situation.

I interviewed Carol Lynley about the movie and it seems her on screen fear was not all acting:

“The only way to describe working on The Poseidon Adventure is hellish. I spent close to four months dripping wet wearing the same dirty clothes. To make matters even worse, I have a tremendous fear of heights. I had it all my life. I usually get very dizzy and throw up. Not attractive. I even went to Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio to try to conquer it. Usually a stunt double is used but in The Poseidon Adventure I had to do all my stunts myself. We would shoot the scenes high up on the catwalks or ladders and when the director would yell ‘cut’ all the other actors would climb down except me. Gene Hackman’s brother was working on the film as a stunt coordinator and he would have to climb up and help me down!”

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ROLLING WITH THE STONES

Below is another excerpt from 60s starlet Gail Gerber’s memoir Trippin’ with Terry Southern: What I Think I Remember to be released in June:

After we had met Brian Jones at Robert Fraser’s place the first time we were in London, Terry stayed friendly with him. I on the other hand had nothing in common with Brian though I respected his talent. We rarely spoke and only exchanged pleasantries. That fall when The Rolling Stones were in New York we met them at the Hilton Hotel on Sixth Avenue one warm November night. They had two entire floors, which were sealed off from the rest of the hotel. Due to throngs of teenage fans camped outside the hotel, security was tight and one had to go up the service elevator to get to their suites populated by burly bodyguards outside patrolling the hall ways. We soon found our way to Brain’s room and a convoy was organized to go to Terry’s favorite restaurant, Elaine’s on the Upper East Side.

Taking the elevator to the basement parking garage, Terry, Brian, and I got into the back seat of a black sedan with a driver. We shot out of the garage like a bullet into a mass of screaming girls in front of the hotel. It seems the trick was to accelerate and speed out of the building into the traffic of Sixth Avenue with a deft left turn. The driver hit the gas to get through the mini-skirted mob but one chubby girl managed to stick to the trunk to my horror. Oblivious to the danger, she kept hollering, “Brian, I love you!” The driver panicked and hit the gas as he maneuvered into the flow of traffic. Everything was moving by us quickly in the dark. I was terrified. Still exclaiming her undying love for Brian, the screaming girl was holding on and looking through the back windshield at her idol, unaware that she was about to slide off and possibly fall under the wheels of a speeding taxi or worse a bus. Brian had experienced this before and told the driver to slow down. He did and the girl slipped safely off the trunk of the car and onto the sidewalk.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY ELVIS!

In honor of Elvis’s birthday, TCM is running a marathon of his movies today starting with King Creole, and followed by G.I. Blues, Blue Hawaii, Girls! Girls! Girls!, Fun in Acalpulco, Roustabout, and Elvis on Tour. Below are some anecdotes from the starlets I interviewed that worked with the King on these movies. All are from my book Drive-in Dream Girls:

“My first reaction was that I thought he was just so handsome. Elvis was also extraordinarily polite with me because I think I was the only girl there that he didn’t date. I felt so sad about that actually. But we just hit it off as friends. We just liked to sit and talk—to my forever regrets!” – Darlene Tompkins, Blue Hawaii (pictured below, 2nd from left)

“I had to be up at five a.m. so it wasn’t convenient for me. I told Joe to thank Elvis for the invite and to send him my regrets but I’d see him in make-up in the morning. And that’s where we first met—in make-up. I was a big fan of Elvis’ music but meeting Elvis Presley did not knock me out. He was charming and sweet. He apologized for calling me in the middle of the night. I told me I was sorry that I was too tired to come down. We got along famously and had no problems whatsoever.

“Elvis did not like Girls! Girls! Girls!. He didn’t like it at all. He was very uncomfortable with performing. He also felt very unsure of himself as far as acting went. He deferred to me continually because he felt I knew more about acting, whatever the hell that is. He was not comfortable with making movies but it was a living and he was indulged. He made quite a bit of money and he supported a lot of people. Hal Wallis had him on a bare-bones contract because Elvis signed a multiple picture deal with Wallis very early on. Once Elvis commented to me, ‘One thing about working with Wallis is that he spends a lot of money on the production, the accommodations and the catering because he has me so cheap. With the money he makes on my movies, he then can afford to go off and do [a film like] Beckett.’” – Laurel Goodwin, Girls! Girls! Girls!

“I almost didn’t do Roustabout because doing an Elvis Presley movie at the time was not really much of a steppingstone. Now I’m glad I did the two films [the other being Frankie and Johnny] with Elvis because they’re the main things I’m remembered for today. I thought Elvis Presley was very nice and very, very polite. It was ‘Yes, Sir, Yes, Mam.’ To me it was ‘Yes, Madam’ because I played Madame Mijanou. He’d say it with that little giggle of his. Elvis also liked to tease me and thought I’d be a good ‘business woman’ in some ‘house’ somewhere. Despite that little joke he was a very shy, Southern gentleman. I enjoyed working with him and can’t say one bad thing about him. Ladies thinks it was so amazing that I was lucky enough to have kissed him. All I can say is that his lips were very soft.” – Sue Ane Langdon, Roustabout

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HERE TODAY, GONE TOMORROW

Pictured is the revised cover for my upcoming book with Gail Gerber with a different photo of Terry Southern. Though not 100% to my liking, it is much better than the other one that was taken weeks before his death.

And below is an excerpt from the “Uneasy Rider” chapter to wet your appetites for more (hopefully!):

When Dennis Hopper showed up at our house in New York we let him stay in Nile’s room, which he complained about and rudely called “a closet.” I tried to stay out of the way as best I could. Dennis was there for about two weeks, and at night he and Peter Fonda would be pacing around my living room, gesturing, and throwing out ideas between passing joints between the three of them. Though Terry was a martini man he would just hold the joint and pass it along most times. Somebody had to stay straight to do the writing so Terry sat with his pencil and a long yellow pad on our golden couch, scribbling away. He would hand the pages to the typist and she would type them up immediately. Dennis would rant and rave, using a lot of four-letter words, and the typist would break into tears, and run sobbing out into the night. Terry would have to call the typing pool the next day, and get another typist. Terry suggested that they change the “drug of choice” from marijuana to cocaine, which was not in fashion yet, because pot was too bulky to be carrying on the motorcycles. Dennis thought that running the credits upside down might be interesting, and he also whined about why the two characters had to die.

Terry loved collaborating with other people. He always felt that two heads were better than one when creating a story or screenplay. Terry was really in his element sharing concepts with Peter and Dennis. He just loved to work in this free-for-all fashion with people yelling out story ideas while nestled on the sofa he jotted down the better ones in pencil on his yellow legal pad. Peter once remarked that Terry agreed to work on Easy Rider on a handshake “just for the sake of having the freedom to play with an idea that appealed to his individual nature.” This statement is oh-so-true.

Terry had the scripts neatly bound and held on to the original. He handed copies to Peter and Dennis, and off they went back to Hollywood. Terry also gave a script to Rip Torn who retained his copy after all these years.